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Just like with everything else in this world, Klaus has a bad relationship with sleep.
At times, he’d go on for days with merely short naps in-between, stuck in self-inflicted insomnia. Other days he’d be unable to emerge from bed, or wherever else sleep found him, even if the world was about to end. And really, the world has been ending quite frequently these days.
Those times he’s stuck between dreams and reality, he’d start to call on Ben wordlessly. Even if he is not conscious about it, something in him must want to summon Ben, for he can suddenly feel his fingers turn solid as the make-believe continues and he gains a physical form.
When it first happens, he tries talking to him. But Klaus would have no answers for him, leaving Ben chained to him for the night, left alone with the illusion of being able to feel again.
“Klaus? What do you want again?”
He expects a selfish reason (from a selfish bastard like Klaus), another annoying task for him to complete, but Klaus only rolls around among the bedsheets with a groan, ignoring him. Ben squints.
“Wait. Are you asleep?”
That night, drunk on the novelty of having a physical form unsupervised, he plans to explore outside, but he soon finds that the farther he ventures from Klaus, the weaker his ability to touch becomes. Haunting the night streets of the neighbourhood touchless and senseless has a pathetic flair to it, so he gives up after a few hours and sticks to hanging around the bedroom instead.
Either way, it's a hopeless prison.
The moonlight filtering through the window paints a silver thread on Klaus’s pale back, and he merely stares at it until his fingers draw close following a curious urge, tracing the light's path. There’s only another soft groan as a response.
“Klaus?”
But no answer comes. He is asleep.
Carried away by the nostalgic sensation, Ben caresses his naked back one more time for good measure, just to make sure he can still feel something. Klaus doesn’t respond at all, only his shoulders rise and fall with each breath he takes. A peaceful atmosphere descends on them, and for a moment he almost believes that Klaus finally sees a quiet and unassuming dream, unbothered in his sleep for once.
That’s the first time.
~~~
Then, days later, Klaus closes his eyes and falls asleep under the shade of the trees in an unguarded moment of vulnerability. It cannot take longer than fifteen minutes, but Ben can feel the strange pull downwards that reminds him that he can touch again.
“Klaus?” he asks, cautiously, nudging him for an answer.
“Not now, demon,” comes the dragged out reply as Klaus blindly tries to slap his hand away.
Ben looks around in the otherwise peaceful garden, then crouches down next to him on the lush green grass. The next time he gently touches Klaus’s hair, the sensation doesn’t wake him anymore.
With a lock of Klaus’s hair curled around his fingers, he contemplates every horror that the connotations of such a small gesture can pull in with itself. Then, he continues with all of that in mind.
Maybe in another life, it would matter. Maybe in another death too, it would matter.
When Klaus’s eyes flutter open, he draws away like he was caught red-handed in a murder scene. Klaus squeezes his eyes shut, then scratches his head at the same spot where Ben touched him before. He sits up and makes a lazy effort to stretch his limbs out.
“How long have I been out?” he asks.
When Ben doesn’t reply, weighing his options, he repeats his question.
“Now, be a good ghost and tell your brother how long he’s been passed out for.”
Ben opens his arms. “Fifteen minutes?”
“Good enough,” Klaus thinks as he struggles on his legs again.
Ben watches him walk away as he gradually loses the privilege of being able to feel the touch of the ground and the grass under his hands with each step Klaus takes. If he concentrates hard enough on the memory, he can still feel how rough his locks felt against the make-believe skin.
Moments like this are gone before they could even start.
Why can they be the most genuine with each other only when one of them is unconscious and the other only silently observes? Ben has never been more of a ghost than when he regained his touch at night.
~~~
After that, he’d linger around at night with a secret purpose, pining for a call. There’s a type of deliberate masochism lurking deep inside him that binds him to Klaus despite everything — and with each passing night, it floats closer and closer to the surface.
There are so many lies and excuses to pull up for times of weakness. All about Klaus being the only one who can summon him with his powers, the only one who’d bear his touch. But they are only that. Excuses.
He’d be able to spend an eternity in this in-between ghost form without burying his fingers in Klaus’s hair — if only he didn’t want to do it so bad. The days he has spent with Klaus by far outnumber the days he spent without him.
No matter how much he thinks about it, the conclusion is always the same. Klaus wouldn’t have called him back if they did not have something unfinished here. And on top of that, knowing himself, he wouldn’t have stayed.
Somehow, all of those events mixed together makes him watch guard by Klaus’s bedside when he spends the night alone, waiting for the tingling sensation in his fingertips that tells him touching is alright. Without Klaus’s powers, he wouldn’t be able to feel anything. Without Klaus’s powers, he would not be here.
At times, the realization hits that no matter how hard he tries to deny it even to himself, all the world is to him is accessible through Klaus. Klaus is his bridge to the world.
Klaus is his entire world. But the opposite isn’t true. For Klaus, he is just a simple factor in the large scheme of things. He’s only a comma in an endlessly continuing sentence that Klaus would rather forget about at times.
But when sleep finally finds him for a few hours, it doesn’t matter. Something in him still calls for Ben.
The moon is glowing silver again tonight, bashfully covering its face with the thick of the clouds. Ben stares at the dark clouds slowly passing before the light for a while, then pulls a blanket on Klaus when a night breeze blows through the open window.
Klaus makes an offended sound but immediately pulls the blanket closer to himself like he was cuddling a small animal to his chest.
“Stay asleep,” Ben instructs him, then sits back on the edge of the bed just close enough to comfortably reach him.
His fingers go on a journey they know too well already, and yet it doesn’t make it any less satisfying. When there are no witnesses (not even Klaus himself), Klaus can belong to him for a stolen night where they don’t have to fight, they don’t have to bring each other down. They only need to exist in silence.
This is the first night that Klaus catches him in the act, his head rolling into Ben’s touch. His eyes are half-open, squinting up at him in the darkness.
His ghost heart leaps.
“People normally just go for it and pull,” Klaus tells him, and he is clearly half asleep.
Ben doesn't have an answer for him, looking for the most natural reaction. Klaus is snickering to himself about something.
He rolls over completely so he’d be facing Ben now and snuggles up with his face in the boy’s lap.
“But if you insist on being vanilla,” he continues, “just let me sleep a bit longer.”
In the next moment, his eyes are closed again. In the morning, he has no recollection of any of it happening.
“You know Banquo, strangely enough,” he tells Ben with wide gestures. He is already at the other side of the room, removing himself from the story. “This was the first night in a long while that I slept through. No ghosts, no nightmares. It almost felt wrong.”
For a lack of a better option, Ben decides to ignore him. There is something in him that needs Klaus to remember, and something else that doesn’t want to know what would happen then.
~~~
He would help Klaus sleep at night. That is the newest thing he starts telling himself, among all the other excuses. It worked once, so why not do it again? Pressing his fingertips against his skin is only to wake him up just enough to be aware of a foreign presence, then lull him back to sleep with a kind of comfort that Klaus may have never experienced before. (Well, not before Dave crashed into their lives, at least.)
It’s not that Ben has experience in any of this, in fact. He is learning on the job.
Their bodies know what to do, and Klaus snuggles on cue, placing his head on Ben’s lap, or throwing his arm around him on other nights, wordlessly begging for the comfort of closeness. Ben wonders if he is ever awake enough to comprehend it’s him, or he simply believes that a pleasant dream is leading him away from reality with each careful caress.
He rarely reciprocates, but when he does, the world is a different place. His arms snake around Ben, pulling him down into a needy embrace.
It's not the act itself but his own reaction that frightens Ben.
"Off with his jacket," Klaus instructs in an almost unintelligible murmur as his nimble fingers get rid of his leather jacket, throwing it on the floor behind them.
Cold panic washes over him suddenly as he squirms under Klaus's lazy embrace. He calls him by his name a few times, trying to get his attention.
"I'm not..." he tries to explain, although he doesn't know what he isn't.
Alive? Whoever Klaus is looking for? (Dave? If we really have to name names.)
"I know you're not, don't be silly now." His arms squeeze stronger, both as an attempt to feel closer and to shut him up. "Let's just enjoy the illusion."
Illusion or not, recently he's the only one who's putting Klaus to sleep. Ironically enough, Klaus has the exact opposite effect on him. If anything, he always acted as an incentive to hold Ben back from eternal rest for all these years.
It is no different tonight. He can feel Klaus's arms grow lax around his waist as he absent-mindedly begins to play with his hair at the back of his head, beckoning him into a quiet, dreamless sleep.
But instead of being drawn into a dream tonight, Klaus's lips seal a kiss on his neck. He makes a surprised sound, trying to object once again but he's being shushed immediately.
"What did I just tell you?"
Whatever he does next is enough to incapacitate Ben completely. He snuggles close, then speaks against Ben's skin. There are sparks deep within his stomach that explode with the intensity of both fear and excitement.
"Do you think that we'd be different if dad ever showed us the smallest fragment of affection?"
He doesn't wait for an answer before continuing to make a point by peppering needy kisses all over Ben's neck, then moving onto his jaw.
"Or is it just that all siblings are fucked up by default and he knew he couldn't help it anyway. Why make an effort with a lost cause?"
Would he have had a chance for survival if they were a functional family? Not even as far as the public was concerned could they even pass as "normal." Their whole family branding lay in the very idea that they weren't normal. That they were different. And mind you, different is just a polite word for fucked up.
When he was alive, he never wanted to be different. He was one of those boys with a little dove heart in his chest: Soft, fluttery, lined with gold.
Only in Klaus's arms does he realize that some things aren't worth fighting against. (Maybe their father was right, deeming them a lost cause.) When it's a losing game, resistance is futile.
“Klaus,” he tries anyway only to have an index finger firmly pressed against his lips.
“Can you at least stop with this good boy act while you’re in my dream? It’s really off-putting.”
“It is not an act,” is the first thing he feels like correcting.
Klaus makes a vague sound of disapproval and replaces his index finger with his entire palm. Ben would go on to explain how this also isn't a dream but he doesn't get the chance. The tight pressing feeling on his lips only loosens as Klaus drifts back to sleep.
~~~
He steals the night from the living the same way he steals it from the dead, posing as an illusion of himself after the sun goes down. We're all thieves under the right moonlight.
When the morning comes, he loses the sense of touch as if nothing happened and he is ready for another day of bickering.
If Klaus remembers anything from the nights they spend together, he's sensible enough not to say. And Klaus is never sensible.
With that, he needs to come to terms with the irrelevance of these nights for Klaus. He's nothing more than a lullaby, a weaver of peaceful dreams, guarding the place in-between dreams and reality.
He looks at it with resigned melancholy, a bittersweet perk. These things are better hidden than left out in the open for everyone to take pity on his slowly decomposing mind. How far has he just come from that little dove-hearted boy?
Is it their situation that made him this way? Did he always have these feelings gradually pooling within him, waiting for the chance to break the dam?
Still, when Klaus turns under his touch seeking voiceless comfort, his ghost heart leaps.
~~~
But Ben isn't the only thief in this relationship.
Klaus, too, steals the night. Once, and once only.
The night-time sun shines with a golden glow that time, crowning the height of the night.
He doesn't immediately respond to the — by now — familiar pull that reminds him of the fact that he can touch now. The night is slow and the golden glow, studded with stars, fascinates him for longer than Klaus finds acceptable.
This is not the first time he'd interact with Ben half asleep, but it's the first time he'd call for him.
"No time to waste," he says with his face buried somewhere under the pillows. "Come here already."
A hand reaches out from the bed, blindly trying to find Ben. He doesn't stop until his hand catches the end of his leather jacket, so he can pull him closer.
"Don't play hard to get now, you're dead already," Klaus urges him.
As Ben follows instructions and puts a knee on the mattress for better access, he peels the jacket off of him, then the hoodie underneath. For someone who secretly enjoys their bickering exchanges, Ben has very little to say tonight in the midst of waging a war against his own mind.
Something about the moonlight and Klaus's hasty but familiar touches put a lock on his lips, unable to find a proper way to bounce off of him. Just for now, Ben thinks to himself, he can allow the absence of a witty remark.
Klaus pulls him into bed with the confidence of a sleepwalker.
"Good boy," he murmurs, right onto the skin of Ben’s neck, which they left now uncomfortably open and exposed.
Although it happens every now and then, Ben is still unfamiliar with the sensation of Klaus being positively assertive towards him. When you spend your nights as the shadow of a cuddle bear, the sudden recognition of your presence may come as a shock. Trying to calm his dove heart, he buries his fingers in Klaus’s locks instead and inhales sharply.
“Welcome home,” Klaus tells him, pressing his nose into Ben’s neck.
The next moment, his lips are on Ben’s. This is the first time he’d attempt a real kiss, and Ben freezes right into it, his eyes darting wide open. He welcomes the kiss with shock, then resignation, then something much more: A yearning that makes him a real thief. He reciprocates then, as an admission of his own guilt.
Klaus laughs into the kiss, and pulls him closer by the cheeks.
“I missed that,” he comments. “I thought I was kissing a statue and not a ghost, for a second.”
He rakes his fingers through Klaus’s hair, fully realizing how precious this moment is to him. All the nights of doubt and silent yearning as a weaver of dreams finally bear their forbidden fruit. The nights he spent stealing have been exposed, then absolved by Klaus’s favourable response.
In this moment of vulnerability, when the endless circle finally looped back into itself, closing off part of their story, he wishes this single second could become eternity to carry on forever. Happiness is impossible to achieve beyond the grave, the same way as it is pointless to chase it in real life. Yet something in him beckons his ghost heart to enjoy and bask himself in the rare golden moonlight.
The world stops. He is dead, kissing Klaus, and there is nothing he’d change about that in this moment. Even so, he finds himself muted by this overwhelming feeling, he’s almost thankful when Klaus stops and presses his cheek on his naked shoulder, cuddling up for another night of dreamless, but peaceful sleep.
“I know you’re dead,” Klaus murmurs, playing with Ben’s fingers on his stomach. “I know you’re not real and never will be again.”
“You make me as close to alive as I can be,” Ben thinks, but Klaus continues without giving much thought to what he has just said.
“But it’s nice of you to come and haunt my dreams in such a soft way, Dave.”
It’s an honest mistake, and it’s only fair for a dove heart to break when it realizes he has never been the thief, but the one who they unknowingly stole all these nights from.
For a while, there is only silence.
Then suddenly, the seconds start to turn and fall backwards.